Frontier is Adding Fees, But It's Really Easy to Avoid Many of Them

Yesterday, Frontier announced that anyone who buys a ticket through a third-party travel agency (including online sites like Hotwire, Expedia, etc.) will have to pay extra fees for amenities like carry-on bags. But this is nothing new for Frontier.

Yesterday, Frontier announced that anyone who buys a ticket through a third-party travel agency (including online sites like Hotwire, Expedia, etc.) will have to pay extra fees for amenities like carry-on bags. But the truth is, this is nothing new for Frontier, it's just another step in the airline's effort to save money by encouraging fliers to book flights through its own website. Here's what's going on.

When an airline sells a ticket through a third-party reservation system, it pays a certain amount for every flight booked. In the case of Frontier, that can be upwards of $25 for a ticket with four flights on it. For that same itinerary, it costs Frontier only $1.60 on its own website. So to discourage fliers from using third-party sites and simultaneously ensure that they don't give away the farm on third-party bookings, they say "if you book on a third party, you do get the lowest fare available, but you don't get all the perks."

See, Frontier long ago created three different pricing bundles. The lowest was called Economy, and that was meant to be more of a bare-bones option. You could still get a seat assignment, but you had to pay to check a bag, pay change fees, pay for better seats, etc. The next one up, Classic, included bags, let you stand-by for earlier flights for free, and more. The highest level, Classic Plus, was fully refundable, came with extra legroom seating, gave you a bunch of bonus miles, etc.

But per these third-party agreements, Frontier has to share its lowest fares with the OTAs, so while, yes, the "Economy" fare showed up on the OTAs, it showed up last year with a different name "Basic." It was the same price as the Economy fare on the Frontier website, but it meant no advance seat assignments were allowed, change fees were higher, and you only earned 50 percent of the miles flown in the frequent flier program.

Yesterday's addition of the carry-on bag fee just steps up that effort. And it's quite a large effort. They're even painting new planes so that instead of saying "FRONTIER" in billboard titles on the airplane, it will say FLYFRONTIER.COM.